The concept of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) in business terms consists of a voluntary scheme in which the provision and conservation of environmental services are incentivized. Those who provide the services (providers) are paid, and those who benefit from or use the resource (users) pay for the service.
Currently, the main obstacle to the development of PSA in Brazil stems from the lack of legal certainty and lack of a regulatory legal framework on the topic in the country. Currently, there are several initiatives at the national level to establish a policy on PSA, the most advanced in terms of progress in Congress being a Bill establishing the "National Policy on Payment for Environmental Services."
Identifying the imminent vote on a regulatory framework that will establish the conditions under which PSA issues will be addressed in the future, CEBDS, together with its member companies, identified the need to act on two fronts to establish the business sector's position regarding Payments for Environmental Services policies.
The first is the launch of the “CEBDS Agenda for a Sustainable Country", when the Brazilian business sector outlined what it expects from the country's future leader in terms of actions to establish the PSA. One of the document's objectives proposes regulating and encouraging Payment for Environmental Services, based on projects submitted by the private sector, through tax incentives, one possibility being the deduction of taxes due—in accordance with the Rounet Law.
The second front is a business position regarding the regulatory frameworks currently under consideration in Congress, where specific recommendations were presented for the participation of productive sectors. This position was included in a publication entitled "Payment for Environmental Services: Recommendations for the Brazilian Regulatory Framework” which will be launched in September in the city of São Paulo.
Regulation of Payment for Environmental Services
The enactment of a regulatory framework should create and regulate ways to negotiate PES with the public sector and establish measures that provide transparency for direct negotiations between providers and users. The framework should generate demand for Payment for Environmental Services through guidelines that allow companies to identify dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities in the use of natural resources. Another important factor is that conservation initiatives that go beyond legal requirements be incentivized through financial or tax benefits, as proposed in one of the objectives of the CEBDS Agenda, aiming for standards similar to those of the Rounet Law.
In this way, a market can be developed where companies, rural producers and other agents, who decide to create their own protected areas and invest in conservation beyond the legal requirement, can profit from the sale of services or resources, allowing the emergence of a new line of business, that of environmental services provider.
